City Lights
Genre: Drama, comedy, silent film
Monument, millionaire, blindness, Butler, Tramp, flower seller
The fact that the legendary filmmaker and actor Charlie Chaplin, especially in his capacity as a meticulous perfectionist director, was the almost floating lightness of his work is not noted. This significant feature of film art at the highest level found in City Lights, which premiered in January 1931 in Los Angeles, in very charming way of expression. The silent film, which came at a time when advancing technology gave the cinematic terrain the actors the ability of verbal utterances marked, within the creative Charlie Chaplin’s most detailed and intensive work process on a film project that stretched over several years of preparation and production – with the ambition of the director to achieve perfection in every detail into it. With the insouciance of his untamed existence roams the Tramp Charlie (Charlie Chaplin) through the urban space, whose complexity he caricatured body with deft comic. As a car blocked his way, he crosses the vehicle abruptly and lands on the sidewalk with a blind flower girl (Virginia Cherrill), which offered him as a supposedly rich car owners their range. This encounter will be his fate, for the tramp falls instantly in the gentle young woman for whom he will be taking the role of promoter and savior, finally. For now Charlie is doing everything possible to raise the necessary finances to allow his beloved one operation of their eyes in Europe. In his occasional drinking blessed contacts prove to be a tendency to depression millionaire (Harry Myers) who seeks only when drunk his friendship to something more fruitful than his efforts as a street sweeper or best riders come to a boxing match to money … , City Lights is not only a terrific simply in all aspects of the late silent film, but told in the unmediated expression of his figures of economical intertitles one of the most moving love stories accompanied throughout the history of film. This skill of tragicomic drama and a universal significance transporting black and white images with their intensive culminates cheerful melancholic moods in a touching finale of intensity, whose delicate beauty is even after eighty years of film history still unsurpassed. And this despite the fact that Charlie Chaplin and Virginia Cherrill during the shooting did not understand and the director of the few dedicated actor in the meantime even fired, but has not harmed her not charismatic interaction visible. Among the legendary masterpieces of Charlie Chaplin is characterized lights of the city by its perfect, in fact balance between comedy, romance and social criticism, and in the credits as “A comedy romance in pantomime” announced this film seems to be gifted expression of a then declining species, the has been created so that a worthy monument of unabated touching effective power. (Mary Anderson)
Title: City Lights Original Title: City Lights Country of production: USA Production year: 1931 Length: 82 (Min) Published at: format: 4:3 tone / language: Dolby Digital Mono EAN: ( #) 4006680052502 Extras: introduction of the Chaplin biographer David Robinson, documentary “Chaplin Today – City Lights” by Serge Bromberg, test recording “The Prince Charming,” Cut Scenes, Photo Gallery, Trailer